Besides sales strategies to avoid, there are other ways to sell life insurance that should be avoided. These unethical ways to sell life insurance mainly come down to who you are selling it to and how you are illustrating it.

-Selling cash value insurance is best when the client is ages 55 and younger. If you sell cash value life insurance to someone over the age of 60, that client should be an affluent client with many different buckets of wealth to draw on in retirement. This way the older client can let the policy grow for at least 10-years before taking loans from the policy.

Selling cash value life insurance to someone over the age of 60 as their primary or even secondary retirement vehicle is reckless and not in a client’s best interest. Selling cash value life insurance to someone over 65 is nearly impossible to work as a good retirement tool.

-Selling EIUL policies with default crediting rates and 3-4% loan spreads should be avoided. This is the classic bad sale we see over and over. Many agents rely on IMOs to run their illustrations. Since most IMOs are not client focused, they give agents totally unrealistic illustrations to go sell with. This works because more sales are made, but it’s not a good way to do business. It’s not a client focused way to do business.

When illustrating EIUL, it’s best to be conservative. Conservative is not giving out an 8.5% illustration with a 3.5% loan spread and projecting that out 40+ years. It’s even worse if the policy you are illustrating has a non-guaranteed bonus.

The bottom line is that you don’t need to be aggressive when illustrating and selling EIUL. When EIUL is illustrated appropriately, the numbers still look great and appropriate sales are not difficult to make.